


The Dreamers

by hetrez



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Conversations, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Friendship, Future Fic, Getting Back Together, M/M, Multi, Relationship Problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-10 23:17:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18417935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hetrez/pseuds/hetrez
Summary: “Eliot, Eliot, I have so much to tell you,” Fen said. She pulled back and smiled at him. God, he had missed her. He hadn’t realized how much. “Josh told me about an Earth tradition called ‘divorce’, and I divorced you while you were away.”“Uh, that’s … good,” Eliot said. He had taken off his wedding ring years ago, when he and Quentin got together again, but this was still, somehow, a surprise.Future fic, Magicians style: friendship, fountains, fighting, fucking, falling in love again, and finding yourself.





	The Dreamers

**Author's Note:**

> ETA on 06.20.2019 GUYS GUYS SOMEONE MADE ME ART. This fic now has a header made by [three-course-fillorian-feast](https://three-course-fillorian-feast.tumblr.com) on Tumblr, go forth and look at ALL THEIR ART IT IS ALL BRILLIANT. 
> 
> —
> 
> So basically every story I write is inspired nearly 100% by one of [greywash's phenomenal meta essays on The Magicians](https://greywash.dreamwidth.org/84963.html), which, my big takeaway from this one was trying to figure out what made Quentin/Eliot feel like a relationship that would last, where Quentin/Alice didn't. My very first thought was, "The way they fight is different." After that it was off to the races.
> 
> This story also came out of my hunger for established relationship fic. Give me more bitter married-couple arguments underpinned by love and codependence and joy and habit and the choice to stay together even when they drive each other nuts.
> 
> Also also, everybody on this show deserves a happy ending. Also also also, don't these fuckers need to get jobs? Who is paying for all their food and plane tickets to Vancouver and shit?
> 
> I'm getting this out juuuuust before tonight's episode, because I am sure everything from plot to character will be epically jossed as of 9pm Eastern tonight. This is canon compliant to 4.11 and can be seen as a canon divergent AU after that.

They went to the Library together, but as soon as they arrived Quentin said, "I'm gonna go find Kady,” and walked away without looking at him. He was down an aisle and had disappeared among the stacks before Eliot could answer.

Great.

Eliot very, very carefully did not throw his flask. He was too valuable to get banned from the Library again, but now he actually -- dammit -- cared about the books. Instead he covered his face with his folded-up jacket and growled into it.

He heard a footstep behind him and whipped around, schooling his expression, but he relaxed when he saw it was Julia.

"Everything all right?" She asked.

“Oh, just perfect,” he said, in that tone he used specifically to drive Quentin nuts. Then he grimaced. _Get a fucking grip on yourself, Waugh_. “Where’s your shadow?” He asked.

Today, Lif was so close to the surface of Julia’s skin that she almost crackled with electricity. It felt nice to be around, like a cosmic-level nerve stim patch. Usually Lif’s brother was a quiet, hulking presence behind her, his eyes glowing and his teeth huge. They had made the golem form to his specifications, and Lif had one as well, but she mostly rode along with Julia when they were dealing with catastrophes. Eliot didn’t understand their friendship, but he was very grateful for the help.

Julia said, “We don’t need him today, and I knew you were coming, so.” She shrugged.

“Well, that’s. Thank you,” Eliot said.

He had learned a lot in the last seven years. About grief, forgiveness, the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend. About god-level PTSD. About his own actions and their consequences. About acceptance. But it was never what you might call _comfortable_ , being around the Monster that had used his hands to murder people.

(Quentin had wanted to shove the Monster in a niffin box, after they had all dealt with Everett. Eliot, to his own astonishment, had been the one to hesitate. Most days, he didn’t regret that.)

Julia smiled at him, and clapped her hands together. “Okay. Ready to get to work?” She asked.

God, she was just as much of a nerd as Quentin. Eliot loved her.

“Yes,” he said, “shall we?” He offered his arm, she took it, and they walked in the opposite direction from where Quentin had gone.

—-

Margo was already at the Fillory fountain when they arrived, with Penny at her elbow. She was looking at it through a piece of glass, but when she saw Eliot she practically teleported over to him. He swept her up in his arms, and buried his face in her hair. It had only been a couple of days, but he _missed_ her.

“Jesus, you took your time,” she said, voice shaking. “If this thing popped before you got here, I never would have forgiven you.”

“That’s not how it works,” Penny said.

“Shut it, Penny 23,” she told him.

Eliot looked over her head at the fountain. It was nearly rebuilt: the statue only partly crumbled at the top, with tiny chips of stone drifting slowly up from the water to attach themselves one by one. It looked like one of those reverse-entropy videos, where they filmed a shattering vase or an exploding water balloon and then played it backward. Only, before Everett had broken the connection to Fillory, the fountain statue had been of Ember and Umber, twin ram’s heads staring majestically out into the distance. Now, without anyone knowing quite how it happened, the statue was of Lif and Lifthrasir: one figure tall and square and dangerous, and the other a graceful stone image of Julia, with flames where her eyes should be. The two figures were facing each other, hands clasped. All that was left to fill in was the top of Lif-Julia’s head, and the tips of the Monster’s teeth.

Eliot pressed a kiss to Margo’s hair. “What will you do if it works?” He asked.

“I’ll go see them,” Margo said softly, clutching the back of his vest in her small, fierce hands.

Eliot nodded, rubbing his cheek against the top of her head. He wasn’t needed for anything until the statue was complete, so he just stood there and held her until she started getting twitchy.

“What’s with you?” She asked, once he’d let her go. “Q still on his picket fences kick?”

When had Quentin told her? Eliot blew a lock of hair out of his face and didn’t answer.

Margo nodded like he’d confessed something. Then she said, “Let me tell you about my last possession case. The thank-you party they threw for me was epic.”

“Bambi,” Eliot said, relieved, "you deserve nothing less.”

They still didn’t really know how Everett had broken the connection. The last bunny Margo had received from Fen said that they had found a stream of magic under Whitespire, and they were going to try to put a crack in the pipes so the magic would stop flowing in and in. Eliot had been stuck in his own mind at the time, so he’d missed the explosion, which had taken out several groups of Neitherlands bandits and launched a stone ram’s head into the air. It landed seven kilometers away on top of the statue of the poison room, which had also crumbled into nothing as the connection to that world was lost.

Eliot had woken to a world quite different from the one he left: Quentin unable to look at him; Julia with a supernova under her skin again; and Margo sick with grief at the loss of their friends, and of the world that had become their home.

Everyone had thought that Fillory was gone forever. No bunnies came through, no travelers could reach it. And then, a little over a year ago, for no reason anyone could imagine, pieces of stone had begun to rise out of the fountain, and the statue had started rebuilding itself.

Margo went quiet in the middle of explaining a pitched battle, her with her axes and a master swordsman with a demon inside him, and asked, “What if it doesn’t work, El?”

What if Fillory wasn’t there? What if everyone was dead? What if they never made the connection again?

“Then we’ll find another way,” he said.

Julia cleared her throat. It was almost time. Eliot grabbed Margo’s hand and pressed a kiss to the palm, and then went over to join the others at the fountain. They had: two people with soul-deep connections to Fillory, a traveler to pave the way, and a goddess to build the bridge underneath them. 

They arranged themselves in a circle around the fountain. Eliot lifted his arms, reaching out toward Julia on one side and Margo on the other. Across the fountain, between the two statues, he could see Penny with his arms out. Eliot quirked a smile and raised his eyebrows. Penny gave him a tired smile back. _Please, please let this work_ , Eliot thought.

Then Julia said, “Let’s begin,” and Eliot felt a door open inside his heart.

—-

Eliot had come back to a life with consequences. He’d come back to a life where his body was starved, stuffed full of drugs and then deprived of them, and exhausted to the point of collapse, and where his actions at Castle Blackspire had led, however indirectly, to the deaths of nineteen people. 

For the first little while, everyone was careful with him. He’d listened to Margo and Penny explain what they had all gone through, what they had done and survived being done to them, in order to get him back. He’d been too tired to feel more than a deep swell of love for all of them, but as he slept and ate and slowly got better, that deep feeling changed from love to guilt, then to shame.

He’d noticed that Quentin was avoiding him. After that initial, desperate, full-body hug while Eliot lay bleeding on the floor of the Library and battle magic had flown over their heads, Quentin hadn’t looked at him or come near him. And Eliot just couldn’t make the choice to track him down. Instead, he slept next to Margo with her hands clutching his, ate whatever was put in front of him, and tried to time his panicked crying jags with his showers. And he dragged the story out of everybody else.

Quentin came and found him on what might have been the fifth day. Time was a little hazy when you were sleeping off god-possession, and Eliot was still losing bits of it to grief and sensory overwhelm. He’d thought he was alone in the apartment that morning; Margo was at the Fillory fountain with Penny, trying to find a way in. Kady and Julia were at the Library, negotiating a cease-fire with the Monster and his sister, and Alice was out removing earworms with a Zelda-approved spell.

Eliot had thought Quentin was somewhere else, too, so he’d curled himself on the sofa in living room, with its wide windows and its heartbreakingly beautiful stretch of sky, and was busy hyperventilating into his hands. Quentin came into the living room just as his gasps turned into sobs.

“Eliot, Jesus,” Quentin said.

Eliot struggled to get a hold of himself. “Wait, just give me a minute,” he said. Of all the fucking times for Quentin to come and find him. He tried to breathe normally, and dragged his knuckles roughly over his eyes.

“How long have you been having these?” Quentin asked. “Does Margo know?”

Eliot could only look at him sideways, and it still hurt. Quentin was so familiar and so dear, but this version of him looked like he’d been locking pieces of himself away for months, and couldn’t remember how to get them back again. He stood across the room from Eliot, with one hand outstretched, and didn’t move while Eliot wrestled himself into submission.

“You know the answer to that,” he said when he could talk again. He wiped at his eyes, covered his face, and wanted to sink all the way through the floor.

Quentin came over slowly, and sat at the other end of the other couch. Eliot had missed him desperately, wanted to reach for him. But he also wanted to scream at Quentin to go away. He split the difference and said nothing.

Quentin said, “I was going to ask how you were, but.” His voice was quiet, empty.

Eliot snorted. It sounded disgusting with his clogged-up nose. “You can still ask,” he said.

“Okay. How are you?”

Eliot took a breath, and looked at him head-on. Quentin was wearing a blue button-down and his hair was shorter. He looked small, hunched over on the couch with his hands clenched together.

Eliot said, “I hurt all over, and I hurt people. My body is fucked to the nines. My home is on the other side of a broken portal, and none of my friends will look at me. I missed you.”

Quentin flinched. “I missed you, too,” he said. He sounded like an automated subway announcement.

Eliot couldn't stand it. He said, “Q, whatever it is that you need to tell me, can you just tell me? Then we can hug it out, which I also missed, by the way, or you can leave me to what was shaping up to be a delightful panic attack.”

Quentin twitched halfway out of his seat and said, “I don’t think now's really the best time. Do you need, can I get you anything?" He looked at the wall or the floor.

This was absolutely not the best time. But he missed Quentin, was hungry for the comfort of him, and he wanted so badly to _know_. So he waited. And waited.

Finally Quentin looked down at his lap and said, “I am so angry at you.” His voice was shaking.

Eliot hadn't quite been expecting that, except of course he had. What else was there?

“And I don’t want to be angry,” Quentin said. “I want to be there for you, and help you recover. You look awful."

"Thanks?" Eliot said. He felt like he'd been falling down a hole for days and finally hit the bottom.

Quentin said, “Ora is dead. Right?”

Eliot swallowed. “Yes, she’s dead.” _Dead fuck_ , he thought, a little hysterically.

Quentin nodded. “You broke my promise to her. You broke my promise to myself.”

“I. I didn’t know what else to do,” Eliot said. “I’m sorry.”

“ _You could have asked me_ ,” Quentin said, and then pulled himself up short. He took deep breaths. He still wouldn’t look at Eliot. He said, “I — and I keep thinking, if you hadn’t done that, then Everett would be a god now and the Library would be too powerful to fight. And you might have been on the Fillory side when the fountain blew, and I would be here, and I’d never see you again. And you’re still hurt, and I fought so hard to get you back. And I'm so angry, I don’t know what to do. What should I do, El?”

Eliot watched him. The way Quentin was holding himself, it looked like he might come apart at any minute. Eliot had wanted so many things, when he was stuck inside the happy place. He felt too small and brittle, now, to hold everything he'd wanted before.

He had promised he would be brave, but maybe being brave was building with the pieces you had. Eliot didn’t have many pieces left, it felt like.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I really am." And then, before he could stop himself, he asked, "Are you too angry to give me a hug?”

Quentin met Eliot’s eyes for a brief, intense moment, and then launched over the coffee table and into his arms. They fell back onto the couch, curled up around each other, Eliot squeezing as tightly as he could.

“God,” Quentin said, voice thick. He grabbed at Eliot’s shoulder, touched Eliot’s hair, gasped into Eliot’s chest. “I _did_ miss you. I'm so glad you're back. How can I be this angry and this happy at the same time?”

Eliot said, "I don't know."

Quentin said, "You're the best friend I've ever had in my whole life. Do you know that? If you do that to me again, I won't get better."

Eliot pressed his mouth to Quentin's hair. "I did know that," he said.

The little things fascinated him: the feeling of Quentin's breath on his neck. The soft ends of Quentin's new short hair. The one fuzzy patch at the back of Quentin's shirt that he could worry his fingers over, again and again, and the feeling of Quentin's warm back underneath it. The way Quentin's hands still hadn't stopped moving, as if they were mapping him out and making sure everything was where it was supposed to be.

"Okay," Quentin said. He was quiet for a minute, and then said, "Will you find me? The next time you're having a panic attack?"

"Even though you're still mad at me?" Eliot asked.

"Well, yeah," Quentin said.

He felt a starburst of love in his chest then, so bright and huge and painful that he was worried for a second he might be having a heart attack. _Someone good and true loves you_ , he told himself, holding on as tight as he could. _Build with the pieces you have_.

—

Building the bridge to Fillory felt — obvious. Once that door in his heart opened, he thought, _of course that’s where it is_ , and went through to the other side to find it. He was still standing at the fountain, but a part of him was also moseying through the multiverse, picking his careful way around the debris of abandoned worlds, as Fillory got closer and closer. He reached a hand out, and Margo took it, and they looked at each other and smiled and kept walking.

Fillory, when they finally reached it, wasn’t quite the same. The diamonds spinning atop the towers of Whitespire were a deep purple, and there was a small village outside of the castle instead of woodlands. Eliot could see: questing creatures, talking animals, a red thread leading from Whitespire to West Loria, a fairy mushroom grove in the north. He looked closer and saw Fen — with a daughter, Jesus, a little girl, maybe three years old, with long honey-colored hair. He saw Josh in the throne room with Tick and Rafe and Heloise. They were older, and they looked like they had settled into their lives. They had survived, all of them. They were incredible.

Beside him, Margo gasped. “El,” she said, her voice soft with longing, “I’m still banished. Look at them. They won’t let me come back.” She tried to pull her hand out of his.

Eliot turned to her, and then they were back at the fountain, looking at each other across several yards of water and stone. Penny was smiling, and Julia was smiling and crying. Margo was just crying.

“Bambi,” Eliot said, and walked over to her. He ran his hands through her hair, and hugged her again.

“I’ve missed it so much,” she said.

And she’d given it up for him. The least he could do was help her get it back.

Eliot pulled out of the hug, put his hands on her shoulders, and looked into her eyes. “Bambi,” he said, “don’t cock out on me now.”

Margo laughed, and wiped her eyes. Then she let Eliot pull her into the fountain.

—-

They landed in the throne room in the middle of a council meeting. Josh was carrying Fen’s daughter on his shoulders and walking in circles, while Fen sat at the head of the table like she’d been born to be High King. Everyone stared at them when they arrived, and Eliot had a moment of wishing he’d dressed better. But then Fen yelled, “Eliot,” in that sweet joyous voice he remembered, and he was around the table and hugging her before he realized he had moved.

He heard Josh say, “Oh my god, Margo?”

“Eliot, Eliot, I have so much to tell you,” Fen said. She pulled back and smiled at him. God, he had missed her. He hadn’t realized how much. “Josh told me about an Earth tradition called ‘divorce’, and I divorced you while you were away.”

“Uh, that’s … good,” Eliot said. He had taken off his wedding ring years ago, when he and Quentin got together again, but this was still, somehow, a surprise.

Fen wrinkled her nose at him. “Yes, it’s very good. I’m so happy to see you. Come meet Peri, and then I want to show you what I’ve done with the castle.”

She turned and saw Margo, and froze.

Margo, who left her scarred arms uncovered to come here. Margo, who was pulling her hand out of Josh’s and standing with her chin up, watching Fen. Eliot had heard the story of her banishment over and over, sometimes told with grief and sometimes with giddy joy that it had _worked_ , that she and Fen had threaded that needle together. He knew what it meant for her to be here.

Margo held herself like royalty and said, “High King Fen, I would like to petition that my banishment —“

“Your banishment is cancelled,” Fen said quickly. “Dissolved. I take it back.”

Margo asked, “What?” Josh reached for her hand again, smiling, and Margo gripped it so tight it looked painful. She stared at Fen, her eyes huge.

Fen said, “Well, I _took_ it back. A couple years ago? Right after the connection to Earth was broken, actually.”

“Fen,” Margo said. Her voice was shaky. “If you don’t start making some damn sense —“

“We know what you did, all of you,” Fen said. She looked at Eliot, flashing him a quick smile, and then turned back to Margo. “To protect us from the angry gods. _Everybody_ knows. I made sure of it."

Margo brought her free hand to her mouth. She was smiling. At the table behind her, Tick stood up and started hustling Fen’s advisors out the door. Fen’s little girl, still perched on Josh’s shoulders, was looking down at Margo with fascination.

Fen walked toward Margo, and took the hand she’d been using to hide her trembling chin. “Welcome back,” Fen told her.

—-

He had asked, when he felt less like he would break if he set foot outside Kady's giant Gossip Girl apartment. And when Quentin had said, "I can't," with his voice soft and sad, Eliot had been able to tuck his feelings away safe inside his heart where nobody could hurt them. It was almost easy, to be happy as the best friend of the best man he knew. It was possible, anyway.

That had been seven years ago, though, and somehow they'd been dating again for the past four, and Eliot _still_ had no idea why Quentin had wanted to get back together with him in the first place.

It’s not like he'd _changed_. He was still desperate for any shred of gentleness, and he got in his own damn way whenever they were offered. He was still mean when he wanted things (thank you, Quentin) and he still made decisions for other people and had to be yelled at until he realized it.

And the friendship he built with Quentin, after they got the Monster out of him, was so _good_. It felt — safe, and strong. When Quentin wanted to start a business as a repairman, but he felt like it was too small and stupid a thing to want as a career path, he’d gone to Eliot to be talked into it.

(“You could drive one of those traveling knife-sharpening trucks. Wear a smock. I love a man in a smock,” Eliot had said.

Quentin had rolled his eyes but dutifully wrote down ‘truck’ and ‘smock’ in the Life Plans Notebook Eliot had given him)

When Eliot kept having nightmares and kept having nightmares and kept having nightmares, Quentin was there every time, to talk to or sit with or cry on. When Kady’s poison room lesions had gotten bad, it was Alice who had come up with the idea to subcontract with the Library instead of signing herself over to it. Julia had found the demon who could draft an agreement even the Library would honor. But it was Quentin, when they figured out they needed a psychic bond spell to summon the demon, who’d said, “Eliot and I can do it,” with no hesitation at all.

They had each dated other people, too. Quentin had gone on dates with women he stumbled past in coffee shops, and Eliot had almost moved in with a man he’d met at a Welters tournament. His life was full, not empty.

But he knew, always in the back of his mind, that what Quentin had offered had been The Thing, and Eliot had pulled up the soft new roots of it from the fragile earth and thrown it away like a weed.

So Eliot was completely unprepared when, one quiet evening, two and a half years after Quentin had finally forgiven him, he was asked, again, to try.

They were at Quentin’s apartment, a cozy place a few towns west of Brakebills campus. Quentin was at the kitchen table, repairing the finicky inner workings of a horomancer’s watch. Eliot was across from him, texting Margo while she hunted demons in Ireland. He had four books on Celtic land magic open in front of him, almost crowding out the watch springs. It was a good evening, and completely unremarkable.

Margo texted, ‘What do you mean, you don’t read Pictish?’

Eliot pulled the book he was struggling with from the bottom of the pile and snapped a picture of the text. ‘Why do you need Pictish anyway, you’re nowhere near Scotland.’

‘Why do you have a book you can’t read?’ Margo texted.

Eliot grinned. He looked up to tell Quentin, and froze when he saw Quentin already looking at him, smiling.

“What?” Eliot asked, wary but pleased. Attention always felt nice, and Quentin was looking at Eliot like Eliot had just given him — something lovely, that he had no idea what to do with.

“Hey, uh,” Quentin said. Then he reached out, slowly, and put his hand over Eliot’s.

Eliot felt like he’d fallen onto an electric fence. “Q?” He asked. His heart started pounding, and his hand gripped Quentin’s back without him quite meaning it to.

“Remember when you told me,” Quentin asked, “that you’d say yes if I ever asked again?”

It was years ago, during that hazy time he didn’t like to talk about, but Eliot _definitely fucking remembered_. “Is,” he cleared his throat. “Is this you asking?”

Quentin got up from his chair, not letting go of Eliot’s hand, and stepped around the table until he was standing over Eliot. Eliot leaned his head back and watched him. The air between them was filled with something like magic, or longing, and Eliot gripped Quentin’s hand and held himself still and waited.

“Is this you saying yes?” Quentin asked.

Eliot, in response, brought their clasped hands up to his mouth, kissed the side of Quentin’s where their palms rested together, and then bit down, hard.

Quentin gasped. He leaned forward, looming over Eliot, hiding them from the world while he almost almost almost —

And then Eliot’s phone buzzed with a string of text messages from Margo, and Quentin jumped back so fast he almost fell over.

‘Where are you?’

‘Demon is here, what can you tell me about Gaelic incantations?’

‘Never mind he’s Russian I got this.’

‘ANOTHER ONE GONE, BABY.’

‘Eliot, where the fuck are you?’

‘You have thirty seconds to answer me or I will activate the tracer.’

‘You promised no more disappearing, you fucker.’

Eliot scrambled for his phone. “It’s Bambi, I have to,” he said.

Quentin took another step back, running his hands through his hair. “Yeah, of course, I. Uh. Maybe I should.”

Eliot, typing frantically, said, “If you leave this room I will not be responsible for my actions."

Quentin didn’t answer, but he also didn’t leave.

‘You wretched cock-block,’ Eliot typed to Margo.

The phone was quiet, and then, 'Coldwater finally jumped, huh? I told you going back to the vests was a good idea. What are you wearing?'

'Goodnight, Bambi,' Eliot texted. Then he didn’t know what to do with himself. The moment felt, not ruined, but definitely dented.

He looked up from his phone. Quentin was still in the same spot a couple feet away, one hand gripping his hair, his whole body nearly vibrating in place. "You didn't, uh,” Quentin cleared his throat. “You didn't answer my question,” he said.

And, suddenly, the moment un-dented itself. Eliot put the phone down carefully so he wouldn’t throw it out the window, and then got up out of his chair and walked until he was crowding into Quentin’s space. "Q," he said, reaching out his hands to touch. "It's always yes."

\---

Fen took Margo on a tour of the castle, while Josh showed Eliot the bearskip board and the cisterne.

"It looks like a cisterne," Eliot said.

"I know!" Josh said. "Surprised the hell out of all of us when it turned out that all the magic in the multiverse could fit in there."

Josh had given Fen’s daughter — Peri — over to Rafe before they left the throne room, and he was taking advantage by swearing whenever he could.

After bearskip ("Which is actually way more fucking fun than it seems at first," Josh said, "Peri plays it with me all the time") he took Eliot to the kitchens and fed him biscuits with berries and something almost like rosemary, and talked about all the ways Fen was changing Fillory for the better.

"You like her," Eliot said, when they'd finished with the biscuits and with year 3 Post Fountsplosion. He had no idea how he meant that: as a lover, or a friend, or an ally, or all three.

Josh shrugged and handed him a pretzel croissant. "I fucking love her."

Eliot had no idea how Josh meant that, either, and it didn't matter. "She's pretty lovable," he said. He was really happy for her, the way he felt happy when Margo accomplished something huge, or Quentin did: as if it it was Eliot’s victory, too, just because it was theirs. _What do you know_? He thought. _More family_.

He grabbed another pretzel croissant and said, "I need to ask Fen something. Do you know where in the tour she'll be by now?"

\---

Fen was back in the throne room, acting out some kind of argument for Margo. "And then I told her, she could either have a questing creature for her own, and _all_ the talking animals of Fillory after her blood, or she could leave peacefully and never come back."

"And she just left?" Margo asked. She was lounging on Fen’s throne with one leg kicked over the side, watching Fen like she wanted to eat her. Fast work, Bambi. Eliot felt very proud.

"Peacefully!" Fen said. "I still get cards on Umber's Day." Then she turned and spotted him and Josh. "Eliot! Walk with me? I have a question for you."

That was funny. "I have a question for you, too," he said.

Fen came over and took his arm. "Perfect. Did Josh show you the north tower? You can step inside the diamonds, now, and the view is incredible." She pulled him along and he went, unresisting.

Behind him, he heard Margo say, "C'mere, Hoberman. We have some catching up to do."

Two for one, Bambi. Eliot felt even prouder.

Fen dragged him out of the throne room before he could hear Josh's answer. She said, "Josh told me having sex with her again was on his bucket list, but he didn't explain why you put your dead in buckets."

Eliot put his hand over hers, where it rested on his arm. "It's a mystery," he said.

Fen gave him a 'Children of Earth are strange but sweet' shrug, which he was so happy he remembered, and then she asked, "What do you think of Peri?" She started leading him up the stairs.

"I'm," Eliot said, and then stopped, unsure. He’d only met Peri for a moment, and had come away mostly with the impression of big wondering eyes and a sweet smile, and a serious devotion to riding on Josh’s shoulders until someone dragged her off. "She’s a lot like you. She seems pretty great, actually.”

“Good,” Fen said, “because I’d like you to be her godfather.”

Eliot nearly pitched forward on the stairs. “What?” He asked weakly.

Fen kept walking, and Eliot let himself be towed along like a barge. She said, “Margo told me I shouldn’t ask you about family stuff right now because you’re sensitive.”

_Hey_ , Eliot thought.

“But I don’t know when you’re coming back,” Fen said. “And this isn’t something you can talk about by bunny.”

“But,” Eliot asked, scrambling for coherent thought. “Josh?”

Fen said, “Josh is _raising_ her,” like Eliot was an idiot or something. He certainly felt like an idiot.

“But, Margo?”

Fen glanced at him. “Well, Margo said she’d be the first godfather. But if something happens to us here, I want to know Peri will be taken care of. We’ve had a lot of unrest in the last year or so, more than we have in a long time.”

At the top of the steps, Fen dragged him left, away from his old rooms. He stared at the hallway with all the plants and tapestries she had hanging, trying to get his bearings, and he almost didn’t catch it when she said, “Earth would be the safest place for her, if anything happened to me. And Margo said she’s not the stay-at-home type, but that you’re with Quentin now and Quentin _is_.”

Eliot felt every hair on his body stand on end. He jerked to a stop, and Fen stumbled, and he righted her and then stepped back and held his hands away. If anyone touched him right now, if anyone spoke to him, he didn’t know what he would do. _Jesus_ , Bambi.

After a minute, he calmed down. It happened faster, now that he’d sprinted past thirty. He said, “I’m sorry, Fen.”

She was looking at him sideways, like he was a spooked horse she wanted to calm. He hated that he felt like that, too. “Are you not?”

“No, no, we are,” Eliot said. “It’s just.” He couldn't make himself say it. For a second he even thought about walking away.

But he was hurting, and this was _Fen_ , and he needed to know. He asked, “Fen, if our daughter had lived, do you think I would have been a good father?”

Fen came up and took his hand. She watched him for a second, looking for something, and then she smiled. She said, “Not at first, no.” Eliot tried not to flinch. Fen squeezed his hand, and said, “But I think you would have become a very good father, sooner than you think.”

Oh. Eliot squeezed her hands back. He couldn’t think of anything to say, and after a minute she popped onto her toes and kissed his cheek. “You don’t need to give me an answer now. Just think about it. And Eliot, I hope you’re as happy as I am.”

He was. Even when they were fighting, he was. Sometimes he felt like he had enough joy inside him to power a star. “Yeah,” he said, and had to clear his throat.

Fen gave him another couple of seconds, and then she switched from serious to happy hostess like turning on a light. “Okay. Do you still want to see the view? The diamond really is beautiful.”

Eliot looked at her. The first time he had met her, on their wedding day, she had seemed ordinary and not quite real, and he’d nearly forgotten about her after. He’d had no idea, then, everything she contained inside of her.

He let out a breath, feeling like all the tension of the last day went with it. _Two for two_ , he thought. _Now I just have to decide_. He nodded, feeling intensely grateful, and sheepish, and a little sad. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go do that.”

—-

They weren’t perfect. They fought more after they started dating than they ever had before. Quentin had a terrible habit of not saying when things bothered him, and bottling them up until he wilted or snapped. Eliot felt insecure to the point of mania sometimes — _still_ , after _one and a half lifetimes_ , why why why — and it came on like a hunger, for alcohol and fighting and erasing himself and sex. Eliot thought Quentin’s apartment was nice to visit but too poky to live in, and Quentin didn’t want to move to Manhattan, but now that they were dating again they both wanted to live squeezed in like sardines the way they had in the previous timeline, and were miserable when they spent the night apart.

But it settled out, mostly. Some of it. Sometimes. They compromised on a fancier apartment in Sunnyside

(“What’s wrong with being on the Metro North?” Quentin had asked.

“I’m already violating my morals with _Queens_ ,” Eliot said. “If you make me live in Westchester like we’re the fucking X-Men, I will never forgive you.”)

with a multi-way portal in the coat closet so Eliot wouldn’t feel like a commuter. They tried to talk about it when they were upset, or lonely, or scared. And the sex was incendiary, which always helped.

But even with the talking and the compromise, sometimes they still hurt each other.

They were lying in bed with Eliot draped over Quentin like a blanket, one ear resting on Quentin’s chest so he could hear the heartbeat and imagine the rush of blood and magic. Quentin was talking through his arsenal of repair spells. There was some sort of magical virus infecting all the books in the Library, causing them to fade away, and Quentin, Alice and Kady had been driving themselves nuts trying to figure out a way to fix it.

Eliot didn’t have the same fundamental inner sweetness that Quentin did, the kind that made comforting someone feel easy and natural. But he could fake it when he wanted to, and Quentin, for whatever reason, took comfort in him anyway. So tonight he ran careful thumbs along Quentin’s arm, his hip, the underside of his chin. He listened. He wrapped his arms around Quentin's waist and hummed along with Quentin's slightly garbled Sumerian. He took all the gentleness that Quentin offered him all the time, and tried to pay it back with interest.

Quentin ran out of repair spells and went quiet for a second, and then said, “I wish I could go with you to the fountain, instead.” He scritched his fingers behind Eliot’s ears, and Eliot rubbed his stubbly cheek against Quentin’s chest until Quentin hissed, a tiny bit of pleasure and pain.

“You could come,” Eliot said.

Quentin said, “Alice wants to try that cooperative spell I was telling you about, she thinks we might really have something. And if the fountain really is fixed, I can go back anytime.”

Eliot said, “It just doesn’t seem fair. You get to go and beat your head against a rock again, and I get to go and maybe have one of the best days of my life.”

“The fountain might not lead to anywhere,” Quentin said quietly. “It might not be the best day of your life.”

Eliot shrugged, which felt fun as hell while he was in giant hot water bottle mode. Something about the way his shoulders rubbed against Quentin’s pecs. Bodies, he had learned, felt delightful even when you weren’t fucking. He said, “Then I’d still want you there.”

Quentin was quiet for so long that Eliot wondered if he’d fallen asleep. “Q?” He said.

Quentin plucked at his shoulders. “Come up here for a minute, okay?”

There was something in his voice, something —

Eliot went, lying on his side facing Quentin, who stared at him with big shining eyes like he’d performed some kind of miracle. Eliot smiled back, baffled. This happened sometimes, that he would do a wonderful thing and have no idea what it was. He tried to just roll with it. Then Quentin said, “Have a kid with me,” and Eliot went into lockdown mode.

“What?” He asked. His voice sounded steady enough, he thought.

Quentin reached a hand out and touched his face, and Eliot knew it was bad because he didn’t want to lean into that touch. Quentin said, “I want to have a family with you again, do you want that?”

“I —“ Eliot took a breath. He probably sounded happy-dazed, not panicky-dazed, and in a minute he’d be a good communicator again. But right that second he was grateful for all the experience he had lying to his previous boyfriends. “Why?”

Quentin shrugged. He pressed his fingers to Eliot’s mouth, then cupped Eliot’s cheek in his palm. He was smiling, and he looked hopeful and in love. “Because this is it. You and me. And that’s what I want.”

Eliot had promised never to run away again. He hadn’t promised he wouldn’t try to hide. He said, “Okay.”

Quentin frowned. “Okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” Eliot said. “Let’s have a family again.”

Quentin opened his mouth, then closed it. He narrowed his eyes at Eliot. “I honestly thought I’d have a little more pushback.”

Eliot should have given him a little more pushback. “You think I don’t want to?” He asked. He had no idea if he wanted to. He wanted _one fucking second_ to think, was what he wanted.

Quentin said, “I thought you’d have a few more questions, at least.”

Eliot asked, “What questions? We can do this.” And then, his thoughts still fritzing like a weak radio signal, he said, “You’ll get a wife again and we’ll have another baby.”

Quentin was up off the bed and nearly out the door before Eliot even realized what he’d said.

“Q, wait,” Eliot said, sitting up.

“Please don’t talk to me right now,” Quentin said. He looked like Eliot had punched him. "I just need to not be where you are, for a couple of hours." Then he left and slammed the door behind him.

And Eliot was left with his fritzing thoughts and his touch-hungry skin and his guilt, and with an anger that, only now, started to bubble up.

Fuck.

—-

Being in the Library always gave him a dry, colorless feeling in the back of his mind, like it was filled with white chalk instead of thoughts.

Kady seemed to be thriving there, as odd as it sounded. It helped that she could leave anytime she wanted, thanks to her vendor contract. It also helped that she had enough power to shake up the hierarchy (thank you, Zelda) and could change some of the rules around Library cards and hedges. It _definitely_ helped that she had some kind of Abelard and Heloise correspondence going with Penny 40, with notes passed up from the Underworld branch through the Bookwyrm.

That was nice for her, and for Alice, who seemed happy as the fulcrum of their tiny, angry, magical detective knitting circle. But today it was especially uncomfortable for Eliot to come back to, after the magic and color and joy of Fillory, and the fact that his own Abelard was still massively pissed at him.

He found them in the same conference room they'd been camped in for days: Quentin, Kady, Alice, Sheila, Phyllis, and Hobart. There must have been three hundred books on the giant conference table, each of them in some stage of disappearing. Quentin held one in his hands, and Eliot could see his beautiful strong fingers through the translucent pages. They all looked stressed and rumpled. Kady’s poison room lesions stood out sickly and red in her pale face. The Librarians were grim. Quentin had blue smudges under his eyes.

They looked up when they heard Eliot coming. Kady and the Librarians nodded to him, and Alice gave him a distracted wave. Quentin put the book down on the table and it disappeared. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Did it work?” Quentin asked. He was looking at Eliot like --

Well, like he was still angry and hurt. But also like Eliot had the secret to making him happy again, not just the secret to breaking his heart. Suddenly, the Library didn't seem so colorless after all.

And _motherfucking Fillory was back_. Eliot grinned, and then he laughed. "It worked,” he said.

Kady let out a breath, and Alice looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Quentin sagged back in his chair and covered his face with both hands. “Oh my god," he said. "Oh my god."

"Benedict can add them back to the Neitherlands map," Eliot said. "And Margo’s gonna need a hall pass."

“What?” Phyllis asked. Hobart looked like he was about to cry.

(It had been nearly the most frustrating day of his life, when he'd learned that Librarians had a spell that would just _take them to the Neitherlands whenever they wanted_. He had almost died for that fucking button, not to mention the clock and the gods-bedamned keys.)

"Done," Kady said.

With that message delivered, and the promise obtained, Eliot thought maybe he was ready for the next tough thing. He looked at Quentin, who was still slumped in his chair with his hands covering his face. It looked less like relief now, and more like exhaustion and hopelessness.

Well, Eliot could help with some of that.

He wrapped a hand around Quentin's wrist -- the first time they had touched since their fight, less than a day but _god_ he had missed it -- and tugged lightly. Quentin looked up from behind the shield of his hands. Eliot said, "We're going to get you some water. Kady, do you have water in your office?"

"... yes?" Kady said.

Next to Quentin, Alice covered her mouth and did a very good job of concealing a laugh in a coughing fit. Eliot smiled, and saw Quentin’s eyes crinkle up above the mask of his hands. They were going to be okay.

He tugged Quentin's wrist again, and Quentin let himself be pulled to his feet. "Okay, water now. Don't burn anything down without us."

"Bite your tongue," Phyllis hissed.

Kady said, “If you wreck my office —“

“Then I will fix it,” Eliot said. He towed an unresisting Quentin out of the conference room.

\---

Eliot had to use a locator spell to find the damn place.

Kady had set up shop in Zelda's old office, when Zelda had (died) transferred down to the Underworld branch. It was basically the same as the first time he'd seen it, with a giant desk and a standing mirror and a Galileo thermometer on the ink-blotter -- except instead of a giant painting of Barbara Bush up on the wall, Kady had page after page of handwritten hedge spells. Eliot liked coming here, as much as he liked anything in the Library besides a very small number of the people.

He went in first and stood by the desk, making sure not to stand between Quentin and the door. Quentin looked around, seeming dazed, and then he looked at Eliot and he smiled. "It's back," he said softly.

“It’s back,” Eliot said, giddy. “They’re all safe. Fen has a daughter.”

“A daughter?” Quentin’s eyes went big and he grinned, and then he seemed to remember the tender bruise they were both poking, and his face closed down again. “That’s really nice,” he said. He stepped back, as if he were getting ready to leave. “Was that all you wanted, or…?”

Eliot took a breath. “Q, I know we're not talking for a little while.”

“I want to talk,” Quentin said, which was such a blatant lie that Eliot didn’t even bother to feel offended.

“And we can leave all our stuff alone. But, how’s it going in there?”

Quentin looked surprised at the left turn, and then he looked desperately sad. Eliot wanted to wrap them both in an emergency blanket and hide away from the world. “It’s. Eliot, people are _dying_.”

“I know,” Eliot said softly.

“When their books get sick _they_ get sick, and I.” Quentin started turning in circles, running his hands through his hair. “A book is a small object, I should be able to do this.”

“I know,” Eliot said again.

“The cooperative spell didn’t do shit. We lost another book this morning, and Alice blames herself because she’s the one who came up with the spell. I just.” He stopped turning circles and looked at Eliot. “I need to feel not-awful about one thing right now, and I have a feeling this conversation isn’t going to be that thing.”

“It might be,” Eliot said.

“What?” Quentin asked.

Eliot took a breath. He thought about Fen, and Margo, and Quentin’s smiling face last night before everything had spiraled out. He thought about Teddy, and Arielle. He thought about the life they had built, maybe by accident, that had been exactly what Eliot had needed. He thought about the life they were building now, so different and still exactly what he needed.

He walked over to Quentin, and leaned down, and kissed him.

Eliot left it soft, almost not there at all, and waited. A question and an offering. Quentin made a surprised sound against Eliot's mouth. They didn't move for a second, just stood there pressed together, and then Eliot felt the moment that Quentin kicked into gear.

Quentin grabbed his collar and leaned up, gasping into his mouth. His hands were everywhere, at Eliot’s hips and on his chest, and then tugging at the back of Eliot’s hair, the way he did when he wanted to be manhandled.

Eliot could manhandle. Eliot _loved_ manhandling.

He spun them around and pushed Quentin back until they were both sprawled on top of Kady's desk ( _sorry, Kady. Thank you, Kady_ ), Quentin underneath him and pulling him closer.

Quentin had once described his sex drive as a Magic Eight-Ball: he had no idea what he wanted until somebody asked him, and then half the time the answer was, "Reply hazy, try again later." Eliot liked that way more than he ever would have imagined: the electric, beautiful feeling of anticipation; the knowledge that when Quentin said yes, he was saying yes to _Eliot_ , and not just to fucking; how powerful Eliot felt, that he got to be the one asking, and the thoroughness and care it brought out of him when he got an answer. And then there was the way that, every once in a while, Quentin would lose his goddamn mind, and all Eliot could do was hang on for the ride.

"Get your fucking --" Quentin said, yanking at his vest buttons. "Get it off." He left the buttons and dragged Eliot down again to kiss him, wrapping his legs around Eliot's hips and pulling like they were in a wrestling match. "Why can't you dress like the rest of us assholes?" He said, biting at Eliot's jaw. "Why do you have to be so beautiful all the time." He sounded so cranky about it.

"Why do _you_?" Eliot asked. He tried to get a hold on Quentin’s wrist, maybe calm him down a little, but Quentin knocked his hand away and kissed him again. "How are we going to have sex if you won't stay still? Calm down."

Quentin yanked his hair again, exactly as hard as he liked it. "No," he said.

Eliot started laughing, little puffs of air against Quentin's mouth, while he tried to pull Quentin's sweater off and Quentin writhed like a cat. "Q, Q, Q," he said. The name always tasted sweet in his mouth. He crooned it against the side of Quentin's face, the curve of his jaw, humming with delight.

Quentin made an impatient growling sound. "If you're just going to laugh --"

"No," Eliot said patiently, running soothing fingers down Quentin's cheek. There was a way to do it -- just _that_ light, next to his mouth _there_ \-- that Eliot knew would drive Quentin up a wall. "I'm going to fuck you _and_ I'm going to laugh."

Quentin let go of his hair and grabbed the back of his neck, pulling and shoving until they were nose to nose, draped over Kady's desk in the fucking Library of the Neitherlands, where anybody could walk in on them. Eliot looked at him and felt turned inside out. Quentin's eyes were so _pretty_ , every part of him was so pretty. And he wanted Eliot, to touch and to argue with and to love. And if Eliot didn't get Quentin's belt off in the next two minutes, he would not be responsible for the consequences.

Quentin said, "Then fuck me."

Eliot laughed for real, then, and kissed him, feeling happiness inside himself like a firecracker, all bright colors and sparks. He reached for Quentin's belt and he thought, _I'm lucky, I'm lucky, I am so fucking lucky_.

\---

One thing nobody told you about getting older with someone was how the fights all rolled into each other after a while, until you only had to say, "Okay," in _just_ the right tone, and your sweetheart wouldn't talk to you for days.

So Eliot and Quentin didn't actually have to have their fight out loud for it to feel big and awful and annoying as hell. In the morning Eliot woke up alone in their giant bed, with his arms aching and empty, and Quentin's side of the bed cold. He brushed his teeth by himself, took a shower by himself, and ran over all the arguments they'd had before, that he wouldn't let himself make now.

He thought, _You can't just spring parenthood on me. You couldn't have had a little finesse about it?_

And he thought, _You're lying to yourself if you thought it was you and me raising that kid together. You had your wife for that_.

He thought, _How am I supposed to trust that you'll still want this in five years, in twenty, when I don't even know why you're with me this time_?

He imagined Quentin saying: _I've mentioned wanting to have a family approximately eighty million times, how much fucking warning do you need_?

And then Quentin might say: _That's cruel and unfair and you know it's not true. She was your family, too_.

Quentin would say: _Why can't you trust that I want you? Why can't you believe me when I tell you why_?

And Eliot would say, _If you really want me to depend on you, then why did you leave before I could even explain_?

Imaginary Quentin had no answers.

They ate breakfast together in silence, one of those ordeals of cohabitation that he hadn't known about when he was younger. You _could_ just ignore the other person, or go to the bakery down the street for coffee, or sleep in, or _talk_ to them, but then they would win the argument.

There was something about needing coffee, and feeling bitterly angry at the person who made it for you, that really made him rethink married life.

He and Quentin got their jackets in silence, not looking at each other, and Eliot felt more and more hurt every second they weren't talking. Why hadn't he given Eliot one fucking minute? Why did he think Eliot was worth it? They were about to go off in separate directions to do eighteen different dangerous things, and any other day Eliot would have kissed Quentin before they stepped through their portal, but he was too upset now. And then he got even more upset, because all he wanted every waking second was to kiss Quentin, except not right now because they were fighting -- and around, and around, and around his head went.

When he and Quentin stepped through the portal, the dullness of the Library hit him like a smack, and he turned to try to get a glimpse of Quentin's smile, or the brightness of his eyes. Anything to bring a little color back in the world. But Quentin didn't look at him, just said, "I'm gonna go find Kady," and he left Eliot in the hallway all alone.

\---

They broke the Galileo thermometer.

Eliot didn't notice until he had his clothes halfway back on -- each item halfway, because it made Quentin smile when he looked over. Eliot was searching for his tie when he noticed the broken glass and the water, and he said, "Q? We might need your expertise."

Quentin, each item of clothing halfway back on because that's just how he _was_ , came over and crouched down. There was a pile of papers on the floor, but somehow they were perfectly smooth and uncreased, and the water didn't touch them. "Hey, there," Quentin said. "What did you used to be?"

It always gave Eliot a lovely, quiet feeling to watch Quentin work. The smooth motion of his hands, the way the objects trusted him with the smallest, most delicate parts of themselves. The way Quentin's confidence in his own skills just kept growing and growing all the time. 

It reminded Eliot, every time, of exactly what kind of person Quentin was. It reminded Eliot how easily he could hand over the softest and most vulnerable parts of himself, for Quentin to keep safe.

Eliot waited until the weird little gnome cap was back at the top of the thermometer, and then he said, "I'm sorry."

Quentin looked up at him, face serious. "Yeah," he said, "I am too."

"I don't still think you need the entire action set to be happy," Eliot said.

"I -- okay, thank you." Quentin's face crumpled a little, and Eliot knew that was the part that had really, really hurt him.

Eliot started to feel twitchy, the way he got whenever they were making up and he had to talk about the things he needed. He looked away and fiddled with the open neck of his shirt. "I don't think I can say yes right now --"

"Yeah, of course not," Quentin said. "I didn't mean let's go acquire a baby right this second."

"I know," Eliot said.

"I just meant, you know, can we think about it?"

Eliot crouched down so they were face to face. He straightened Quentin's collar and started buttoning his shirt up. He stared at his fingers as he said, "I don't know if I ever told you, but the first, oh, two decades that we were in that other timeline, I got along with raising Teddy by telling myself I wasn't really his father. He had you and Arielle, and then he just had you. I could love him as much as I wanted because I wasn't, you know, his dad."

Quentin put his hands over Eliot's on the buttons. "Yeah, I've met you, El. I know that."

What?

He looked up at Quentin, shocked, and Quentin grimaced. "And, having met you, I know I asked in the worst possible way."

"Oh," Eliot said. "Well."

"But you _were_ his father. And you were good at it. And if you wanted to do that again, I want that too."

Eliot took a breath and said, "I don't know."

Quentin lifted one of Eliot's hands and pressed a kiss to the palm of it. "Okay." Then he dropped Eliot's hand and turned to the piles of papers on the floor. Conversation tabled for now, NBD, let's do this again sometime soon.

But now Eliot's mind was going _tick, tick, tick_ and he couldn't stop it. "Daycare would be a nightmare. Do you know how many magical babysitters there are?"

Quentin glanced at him and smiled, and went back to the papers.

"None, is how many," Eliot said. "No magician wants to be a babysitter, why would anybody want to be a babysitter when they could go flying instead?"

"Uh huh," Quentin said. He put the stack of papers back on Kady's desk, and started straightening the ink-blotter and the books.

Eliot stood up, and finished buttoning his vest. "And our lives are really dangerous, it's not like we're safe in a shack in a field somewhere. Trouble seems to follow us around, like . . . oh, shit."

Quentin's hand went still on the stack of books. "What is it?" He asked.

Eliot said, "The _fountain_. Fen said there's more unrest in Fillory in the last year, as in _since the fountain started rebuilding itself_."

"Oh, shit," Quentin said.

"I have to, I need to talk to Penny," Eliot said.

"Yeah," Quentin said, "go, I'll just." He looked around the pristine office and then down at his hands, as if surprised at them.

Eliot loved him. He walked over and cupped Quentin's face in his hands and kissed him, another soft kiss, the kind you give someone when you know you'll be able to kiss them a thousand more times and you don't need to make this one flashy.

Then he bonked their foreheads together lightly, to make Quentin give that brief soft laugh of his, and left to go face the next crisis.

\---

The diamond really was beautiful. Eliot refused to go up into it, but he and Fen stood on the parapet and looked up, watching it as it turned.

"When did you get the idea for this?" He asked.

Fen said, "Todd took me and Fray to Coney Island once. I liked the rides."

Eliot laughed, and reached for her hand. Around them he could see green and hills and, far to the north, the edges of the fairy mushroom grove. He thought, _I could stay here forever_ , and then he thought, _I want to bring Quentin back here_. Being with someone was the weirdest thing: he could feel sad and defensive and angry and mean, and still want, more than anything, to take them on a ride at Coney Island. He said to Fen, "I am happy."

She squeezed his hand. "And you'll think about it? What I asked?"

It was a small thing, in the grand scheme of everything Eliot had faced in this life, but it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down. Except Quentin would be there with him, and so would Bambi, and if he needed them, so would all of his friends. And he'd made it to the bottom safely before. All he had to do was figure out if he wanted to again.

Eliot took a deep breath, and he jumped. "Yes, I'll think about it," he said.

**Author's Note:**

> Lif and Lifthrasir are the twins who survive at the end of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. Their names kind of translate to Life and Life. In the Poetic Edda they're human, but if The Magicians can remix mythology then fuck it, so can I.
> 
> And [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_thermometer) is a Galileo thermometer.


End file.
